


Day Breaks, Mind Aches

by CosmoKid



Category: Scream (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Episode: s02e05 Dawn of the Dead, M/M, Noah Foster Deserves Better, Possibly Unrequited Love, and yet i wrote this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 09:32:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15140186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CosmoKid/pseuds/CosmoKid
Summary: “We were friends,” he hears himself saying, the word seeming foreign on his tongue. “Well, since last October. Before that, we were, I don’t know, not friends.”The nerd crushing on the jock, trying to keep his sexuality crisis eternally just around the cornerremains unspoken on his lips. Not that it matters, really. It’s not important; who Noah is crushing on, and has been crushing on for far too long.Or a different take on Noah's interview with Acosta after Jake's body is revealed.





	Day Breaks, Mind Aches

**Author's Note:**

> I say his body is revealed, I mean dropped onto stage like a bloody sack of potatoes, but I couldn't find a nicer word for it so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> 
>  
> 
> Title from For No One by the Beatles

“We were friends,” he hears himself saying, the word seeming foreign on his tongue. “Well, since last October. Before that, we were, I don’t know, not friends.”

 _The nerd crushing on the jock, trying to keep his sexuality crisis eternally just around the corner_ remains unspoken on his lips. Not that it matters, really. It’s not important; who Noah is crushing on, and has been crushing on for far too long. What would the police want with that information? Besides, Brooke’s the one who dated Jake, not Noah.

He lets himself spew some nonsense about how the _thing_ with Piper changes people. How nearly being murdered was essentially a bonding activity for them, made them friends.

Whether or not they were really friends is debatable. Audrey seemed to have slotted in well with Brooke and Emma, but him, not so much. He and Kieran have never really got past the boyfriend of my best friend’s friend stage, and he and Jake. Well, they were just kind of there at the same time a lot. Their relationship was better defined when Jake would push him up against a locker to intimidate him or when Noah was in an eternal state of fear of being the next star of a Nina Patterson video.

Noah’s still not sure he was ever anything more than a weak replacement for Will. 

“Of course. I want to thank you for sitting down with me,” Sheriff Acosta tells him and Noah thinks he might nod in response before he’s patted on the shoulder, but his brain is reeling and he doesn’t know where to look or what he’s really doing anymore. “This must be rough on you.”

“Well, we’re kind of used to-” he starts but cuts himself off with a nervous chuckle. “Yeah, actually, it’s… it’s awful.”

There are no other words for it, really. It’s awful. He feels sick to his stomach and it still hasn’t sunk in. Jake Fitzgerald is dead, and they all thought he was just being an ass for a few days. It feels wrong.

“I’ll keep this brief, then. When was the last time you saw Jake?” Acosta asks him and Noah has to stop himself from asking if he means only in real life because Jake has a tendency to show up in his dreams and Noah has almost no verbal filter.

“At a party, the other night, like five days ago,” he says, trying to shut his brain up. He can feel the tears threatening at the corner of his eyes.

“So you hadn’t seen Jake in five days?” Acosta asks, looking slightly suspicious. Noah stares at him blankly, not sure how to explain the complexity and inner workings of their friendship. It wasn’t really a pretty one.

“Nobody had. He’d had a fight with Brooke, and she thought he was playing some elaborate game of hide and seek with her,” he explains the best he can. It was complicated. He didn’t get it himself, but he’d written it off as some weird teenager thing.

“For five days?” Acosta still sounds disbelieving and Noah gets it. He’d never quite understood the Brooke and Jake thing, but then he was never sure if that was the jealousy talking.

“You have to understand Jake,” he tells Acosta, although he doesn’t really know if one can ever understand Jake Fitzgerald. “I mean, he went to great lengths to be a pain in the ass sometimes.”

Acosta regards him for a few moments, lacing his fingers together in front of him on the table. “You must have been a little worried, at least?” he says, and although it’s phrased as a question, it sounds more like an accusatory statement.

He thinks about telling Acosta how he would have believed Jake had become a Queen of a small European country or had traveled to a newly found continent to observe millipedes before he would have believed he was dead, but he doesn’t know if Acosta would understand it. The rest of them would because he knows that they all would have done the same.

“Of course, I was. We all were,” he blurts out, and rubs his eyes, blinking hard. “It was just easier, you know? I wanted him to be okay, I still do. God, I just. I can’t believe it’s, it’s real. Jesus. He’s dead and there’s part of me that just thinks he’s alive still… God, I don’t even know how Brooke’s coping right now. It’s one thing to love someone who got murdered, but to be loved back and have the body dropped right in front of you? Jesus Christ, that’s, it must be like _torture._ ”

He cuts himself off, screwing his eyes shut. He always babbles and can never shut himself up.

“I don’t want to intrude, but can we go back to something you said there?” Acosta asks, speaking slowly. Noah blinks, replaying what he said there.

“…Oh,” he says and runs his tongue along the back of his teeth. He swallows the bile building in the back of his throat and takes a deep breath. “I uh said that, didn’t I? Out loud?”

Acosta nods. “Did anyone know about, about that?”

“What? You think someone killed him to get back at me?” he asks, almost too dumbfounded to speak. “Why would they do that? No one knew. And why would they even do that anyway? It would clearly hurt Brooke much more than me. It hurt us all, not just me or Brooke. I just… I wish there was something I could do. It’s starting again and there’s nothing I, _we_ can do about it.”

“You think it’s happening again, starting with Jake?” Acosta asks and Noah nods, leaning forward.

“Well, yeah,” he replies, feeling his heart speed up again almost in turn with his breaths becoming faster and shorter. “People uh rank us, the Lakewood Six, online and Jake is, well he’s pretty consistently last. Now that Emma’s back, Piper’s accomplice is finishing the job, and… doing it for the fans this time.”

Acosta pauses for a second to take it in as if he’s somehow not aware of this happening. It’s been rooted in Noah’s brain for months so the idea that someone’s just not aware of it is alien to him. “So if we say the killer is doing _that_ , then who’s next?”

He racks his brain, trying to average it out. The middle tends to be a little wishy-washy so he can’t pinpoint just one person. “Um, either Kieran or Brooke, or me, I guess.”

“Okay, okay,” Acosta murmurs, his face showing more emotion than Noah’s really ever seen from him. He looks genuinely worried now. “Can I ask you some questions about Jake?”

“Yeah, you can, you can do that,” he says, crossing his arms on the table.

“How was Jake acting the last time you saw him?” Acosta asks, leaning back in his chair.

“Like Jake,” Noah says simply and shrugs. Jake has, _had_ a very specific way of acting that almost no one else could do. “He was a bit of an asshole, entirely too charming despite it like he always was. I guess he was a little sweeter to Brooke, but not that much because he was still Jake.”

“And how did that make you feel?” Acosta asks, his voice a little hesitant.

“If you’re suggesting I killed Jake because of some jealousy-fueled Mark Chapman fantasy, I didn’t,” he almost spits out, the words feeling like poison on his tongue. His lips twist and his eyes narrow without even meaning to. “I was just happy we were all alive and together. No matter what my personal feelings were.”

“Okay,” Acosta says again, although there’s a hint of regret in his voice. “So Jake wasn’t acting weird the last time you saw him?”

Noah shakes his head and leans back in his chair. “No, no, he was… he was just Jake and I guess that’s all he needed to be to be murdered. Just Jake.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! :)
> 
>  
> 
> come cry with me about way too many tv shows on [tumblr](https://cosmo-k-i-d.tumblr.com/)  
> 


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